I was browsing around Launchpad looking for stuff coming up in the new Ubuntu 11.04 and found Shutter.

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.

I also saw this in their Launchpad page

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WE WANT YOU! Please help us to translate Shutter to every possible language.
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Translate the main program and shutter plugins: https://translations.launchpad.net/shutter

So I thought I’d help out and started translating to Sinhala. It wasn’t easy at first I had to setup some fonts and get a decent keyboard working.

The state of Java and MySql are changing. In case you missed it. Sun bought MySql and Oracle bought Sun. I’ve been working on Java for over 10 years and MySql for over 5 now. I’m not happy with what is happening.

The Java and MySql websites have changed. On the mysql.com site there is no prominent link to get to the community edition. If you go to mysql.org to redirects to dev.mysql.com where you can find it.

This is not good for me or a country like Sri Lanka. Most of the solutions I’ve been involved over the years have used open source foundations. So we were able to deliver solutions to clients at a very reasonable cost. If things get too commercial I’m a afraid the licensing costs will far overtake the implementation costs.

I’m sure there will always be open source or free to use versions of Java and MySql, but with a large commercial entity backing them profit comes first then community. I don’t know I think its time to look at some alternatives.

Secure email is a good thing to have even for personal use. Most emails travel as plain text and get stored on servers for a long time. By using this setup you can exchange public keys and encrypt mails before sending. Only your private keys can open them.

I sometimes get spam or phishing mails from my friend’s computers. Those are from bad bots that got into their computers.

Also anyone can set the from field to any other email address and impersonate another person.

Using PGP you can sign your emails as well so the receiver can be pretty sure its you sending the mail.